Busy times in the world of Facebook. Let’s get straight into our monthly growth and engagement study for March.

50 million businesses run Facebook pages

Facebook has released some impressive stats during the month. 50 million businesses now use Facebook pages. More than one billion of Facebook users are connected to at least one business page.

More than 80% of users in the US are connected to businesses. More than 2.5 billion comments are posted on pages every month.

Let’s have a look at how the pages in our study fared in March. Page Likes growth for the pages we looked at was at 0.18% of the total audience. This is a 28.57% increase compared to February. It’s the highest page likes growth we’ve seen since November 2015.

Advertising and branded content

Facebook now has 3 million active advertisers. They’re adding 500,000 advertisers every six months.

42.15% of the pages we looked at used Facebook advertising in March. They paid for 30.01% of their total reach.

One interesting advertising news is that Facebook has changed their branded content policy to enable verified pages to post branded messages on the platform. Branded content is now an officially approved strategy for you to use in order to get your message in front of more people.

It’s something worth experimenting with in order to figure out which of the two options (branded content versus Facebook advertising) works best for you and gives you the best return on investment.

Reach is up, while engagement is down

The average post reached 11.41% of the total pages likes during March. This is a 5.06% increase compared to February and it’s the highest post reach we’ve seen since we started doing our studies in May 2015. Facebook post reach has now increased by 59.58% since the low point in November 2015.

Video continues to dominate the reach. An average video post reached 12.81% of the audience. Photos were second best reaching 12.04% on average, while links reached 10% of the audience and status updates reached 6.45%.

Average post engagement in March was at 4.92% of the people reached. This is a 0.41% increase from February. Post engagement is down 25.57% since the high in May 2015.

Video posts also engaged the most people. 5.16% of people reached engaged with a video, while 5.11% engaged with a photo post. Status updates came in third with an engagement rate of 4.74%, while links engaged 3.8% of people reached.

“Original Broadcast Sharing” is down too

Users upload more than 2 billion photos every day across Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. All this is not enough to stop the decline in active posting on Facebook.

Confidential data shows that total sharing declined by 5.5% year over year, and original personal posts (Facebook calls them “original broadcast sharing”) declined by 21% year over year as of mid-2015.

The latest numbers show that personal posts are further down 15% this year compared to last year. 57% of users who use the platform post something in a given week, but only 39% post something personal. Active users post approximately five original pieces per week. It’s especially people under 30 years of age that share much less than they used to.

Facebook is trying to combat this decline with several initiatives including reminders about big events and reminders about posts from your past such as the “On This Day” feature.

Facebook for content consumption, while messengers for engagement

Users might not be posting and sharing as much anymore, but Facebook is still attracting young people much more than any other platform. A recent study has shown that people between 18 and 35 years of age spend more than 2.5 times as many minutes on Facebook as on Snapchat (the second best platform). Instagram is in the third place.

So where are all these people sharing and posting if not on Facebook? They’re engaging in messenger apps. They’re using Snapchat. They’re live streaming. Facebook has plans to try and dominate each of these.

The expectation is that Facebook newsfeed will become more of a news consumption area, while it’s the Messenger and WhatsApp where the engagement will be going on.

Let’s take a look at what Facebook is working on.

Live Streaming is now a priority

One way Facebook is trying to get people to share more content is by pushing live streaming. Live streaming is dominating right now as Facebook is shifting their resources into it. All the new features announced during the month show this reorganisation.

Facebook is working hard to help users discover live streams. There’s a live map for the desktop, but also a dedicated “Video” section on the mobile app showing you who’s live right now. They have prioritized live stream videos in the news feed. They send notifications to your followers when you start streaming and they notify the followers if they’ve missed a stream. Live streams are now part of trending content, they’re in search results and much more.

Live streams also feature Facebook reactions. There are live filters for you to use too when broadcasting (thanks to their acquisition of the video filter app called MSQRD). Plus analytics are now available too. According to Facebook “people comment more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos”.

Some partners are paid to livestream

Live streaming is so important to the company that they’re even paying some partners to use it. New York Times, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Vox Media and Tastemade are some of the publishers paid to livestream.

This strategy seems to be having a great impact. BuzzFeed’s exploding watermelon is the most viewed live stream on Facebook yet. 807,000 viewers watched at the same time at one point towards the end of the 45-minute broadcast. More than 5 million people watched it in total posting more than 315,000 comments.

The company is also looking to go beyond smartphones for the recording of live streaming. Live API is now publicly available. Publishers are able to integrate live streaming into their control rooms in order to stream TV quality broadcasts.

Copyright owners can now better control where their videos are posted

Facebook have also finally launched the Rights Manager to help combat users who are posting other people’s videos without permission. It’s very similar to the system in place on YouTube and will help copyright owners get better control over their video content on the platform. Rights Manager includes live videos too. You can apply to get access to the tool here.

Next up on the roadmap is the ability to monetize your Facebook video and live video content.

Lesson here for you is that Facebook wants live streaming to succeed. They want it badly. If you start live streaming quality content right now you will have a great chance of finding an audience. Live streaming is personal, raw and unfiltered. It doesn’t require as much production and scripting as traditional video. It’s a great opportunity for brands.

According to Zuckerberg: “People look at live video and they think this is a lot of pressure because it’s live; it takes a lot of courage to go live and put yourself out there. But what we’re finding is the opposite. A lot of the biggest innovations have been things that take some of the pressure out of posting a photo or video. Because it’s live, there is no way it can be curated. And because of that it frees people up to be themselves. It’s live; it can’t possibly be perfectly planned out ahead of time. Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s a great medium for sharing raw and visceral content.”

Here’s Mark introducing some of the new video tools with a live stream:

Messenger and chatbots are the future of Facebook engagement

Messenger apps are now where people spend an increasing amount of their time. Facebook Messenger has 900 million monthly active users while WhatsApp has more than 1 billion. 60 billion messages combined are sent every day on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

A bot store is opening up and you can now build your own Facebook Messenger bot too. Your business should get ready to operate as a chatbot within the Messenger platform (and other messenger apps) very soon. Facebook has a help section to get you started.

A new integration with KLM Airlines shows what’s possible to do. The integration allows you to check-in, get boarding pass and chat to the customer support.

Facebook aims to help businesses transition to the post-app internet. The company is testing a new “Suggested Businesses” feature which suggests users businesses and bots they should chat to on Messenger.

Businesses are also going to be given usernames and scannable codes for easier connection with the users. Your username will be the same as the name in your page vanity URL.

There are also URL shorteners (m.me/yourusername) that will help businesses promote their Messenger accounts. Try for example m.me/CNN, m.me/SpringNYC and m.me/HiPoncho for some early bot experiences.

Here’s the F8 conference keynote in which Mark announced many of these new initiatives.

Instant Articles are available to all

Instant Articles are now available to anyone with a Facebook page and a website. Users are opening Instant Articles 20% more frequently than articles on mobile-friendly websites. They’re also sharing Instant Articles 30% more than other articles, and they’re 70% less likely to bounce from them immediately compared to other articles.

Facebook is making Instant Articles more attractive to use. One of the new features being tested is the ability to include a call-to-action to subscribe to an email newsletter. This will allow companies to build their email databases through Instant Articles.

Is it all positive for Instant Articles? Traffic going from Facebook to external websites has dropped by 20% from January to March 2016. Publishers that were early partners of Instant Articles have seen the biggest drops.

Things to do this month

● Start live streaming. Facebook wants to make streaming succeed. It’s much easier to get started with live streaming compared to traditional video. A smart phone and an app is everything that’s needed. Now you just need an interesting concept.

● Explore branded content as an alternative to paid advertising. Now that branded content is official it’s worth exploring it. Can it bring you better ROI compared to traditional Facebook advertising?

● Experiment with Instant Articles. Take a moment to think about what it entails. How does posting an Instant Article affect your website traffic? How does engagement on an Instant Article compare to engagement on your website? How do Instant Articles compare to simply pushing a link post on your Facebook page?

● Get your business on the Facebook Messenger. Messenger apps are the future platforms for engagement with users. Think about what your Messenger chatbot should be able to do and what it could help your users with?